Saturday, March 05, 2016

The LMS is dead, long live the LMS! (10 pros & 10 cons)

The LMS is dead, long live the LMS! (Swap out LMS with VLE
if you wish.) Some love them, some hate them. Some love to hate them. Me? I see
downsides and upsides. They work for some, not for others. So here’s my 10 pros
and cons.

1. Zombie LMS

Some organisations have a Zombie LMS. At the very mention of
its name, managers and learners roll their eyes. Organisations can get locked
into LMS contracts that limit their ability and agility to adopt innovations. Many
an LMS lies like an old fossil, buried in the enterprise software stack,
churning away like an old heating system – slow, inefficient and in constant
need of repair. Long term licences, inertia and the cost of change, see the
organisation locked into a barely functional world of half-dead software and
courses.

2. Functional creep

Our LMS does everything. “Social?” “Yes, that as well”. Once
the LMS folk get their hooks into you, they extend their reach into all sorts
of areas where they don’t belong. Suddenly they have a ‘chat’ offer, that is
truly awful – but part of the ‘complete LMS solution’. For a few extra bucks
they solve all of your performance support, corporate comms, HR and talent
management problems, locking you bit by bit into the deep dungeon they’ve built
for your learners, never to see the light again.

3. Courses, of course

The LMS encourages an obsession with courses. I’m no fan of
Maslow’s clichéd pyramid of needs but he did come up with a great line ”If you
only have a hammer, you tend to see every problem as a nail.” That’s precisely
the problem with the LMS - give an organisation an LMS and every problem is
solved by a ‘course’. This has led to a culture of course production that
aligned with the use of the LMS and not with organisational or business needs.

4. Cripples content

Throw stuff into Blackboard and it spits out some really
awful looking stuff. Encouraged to load up half-baked course notes, teachers
and trainers knock out stuff that conforms solidly to that great law of content
production – GIGO – garbage in garbage out.Graphic, text, graphic, text, multiple-choice question….. repeat. Out
goes simulations and anything that doesn’t conform to the simple, flat, linear
content that your LMS can deliver.

5. One size fits all

With the rise of AI, adaptive and personalised learning, the
LMS becomes an irritation. They don’t cope well with systems that deliver
smart, personalised learning pathways. The sophisticated higher-level learning
experiences are locked out by the limited ability of the LMS to cope with such
innovation. The LMS becomes a sort of cardboard template through which all
content must fit. There are the formal courses that most organisations need to
some degree, informal learning (often with a social dimension) and performance
support (rarely done well from a LMS). But it’s the ‘learn by doing’, or
experiential learning, that most LMSs really squeeze out of the mix. It’s often
disguised within an LMS delivery as ‘workforce planning’ but that’s a sop.

6. Compliance hell

We all know what happened in compliance training. L&D
used the fallacious argument that the law and regulators demand oodles of long courses.
In fact, no law and vey few regulators demand long, bad, largely knowledge-only
courses. This doesn’t work. In fact, it is counterproductive, often creating a
dismissive reaction among learners. Yet the LMS encourages this glib
solutionism.

7. Completion
cul-de-sacs

With the LMS, along came SCORM, a ‘standard’ that in one
move pushed everyone towards ‘course completion’. Learning via an LMS was no
longer a joyous thing. It became an endless chore, slogging through course
after course until complete. Gone is the idea that learning journeys can be
interesting, personal affairs. SCORM is a completion whip that is used to march
learners in lock-step towards completion.

8. Privacy

I once questioned the surveillance role of LMSs at a Masie
conference, pointing out that the first LMS had been built and sold to Hitler
by the then IBM CEO Tom Watson. He went apeshit (I later realised that IBM
was a sponsor). But I’ve always been wary of the privacy issues through an
LMS. There is general unease among employees about being measured in this way. Now,
of course, there are data and privacy legal issues. These vary from country to
country, Germany being particularly fierce. This remains an interesting and
contentious area.

9. Surveillance

Explicitly gathering data through an LMS may also have a
deleterious effect on learning, making people more nervous than they should be
about who is watching their behaviour and why. There is the nagging worry that
such data may be used to determine their future in a deterministic and unfair
fashion. They’re not far wrong. Take Myers-Briggs, HRs favourite Ponzi scheme,
that has been shown to be wrong but is still used, shamefully, to determine
recruitment and promotion decisions.

10. Limits data

Given the constraints of most LMSs, there is the illusion
that valuable data is being gathered, when in fact, it’s merely who does what
course, when, and did they complete. As the world gets more data hungry, the
LMS may be the very thing that stops valuable data from being gathered, managed
and used.

Now the pros….

1. Migration from
classroom

It’s often forgotten that the LMS was, in the early days,
the prime mover for shifting people away from pure classroom delivery. This is
still an issue in many organisations but at least they effected a move, at the
enterprise level, away from often lacklustre and expensive classroom courses.
In fact, with blended learning, you can manage your pantheon of delivery
channels, including classroom delivery, through your LMS (classroom planning is
often included).

2. Scalable

Scale has many meanings. Do you want 24/7, on-demand,self-paced, secure, location flexible, responsive, multi-language, relevant
to your future, global & local, affordable, value-added learning? Without technology this is undoable. An
LMS not only gives you scalability, it makes you think on scale and solve the
problems that scalable solutions bring. This has been made much easier by metered,
cloud delivery.

3. Controls chaos

There are arguments for letting a thousand flowers bloom but
this can turn into a nightmare if everyone starts to become auteurs. Amateurism can
turn learning into a cottage industry with lots of duplication of content, poor
quality resources, unnecessary licence costs and an unmanageable mess. An LMS can bring order to potential
chaos.

4. Consistency

Large organisations, especially global organisations, need
to have some level of consistency in terms of strategy, brand and messaging - this affects learning. Consistent rules about design, development and delivery
are not always bad. It can lead, if managed properly, to a rising tide of
relevance and quality. An LMS can help an organisation be consistent.

5. Integration

Whatever way you cut it, an organisation will have a load of
systems that need integrated. However you identify your people, store stuff,
deliver stuff and manage data, there will be integration issues. An LMS is
simply a single integrated piece of software. It’s that simple. You may want to
do without one but you’ll end up integrating the other things you use – and that
will be, a sort of LMS (thanks to Andy Wooler for this interesting observation).

6. Manages people

Large organisations need to manage large numbers of people,
especially as they come and go. The LMS, linked as it should be to HR data, can
ensure that the right people get the right learning. It also allows the
organisations to guide learners forward, with essential, even legally required
learning and desirable options for induction, relevant management training and their
personal development. It gives people choices.

7. Manages stuff

Organisations have a lot of stuff to handle; induction
materials, compliance, product knowledge, management needs, practical skills….
To operate in a complex environment you have to be as good as, then smarter
than others. This level of complexity needs management. An LMS will manage, not
only learners but what has to be learned. With newer authoring tools, such as ADAPT, content can be made to look contemporary, with a move away from the linear page-turning paradigm.

8. Costs

Enterprise software may seem expensive but at the ‘cost-per-user’
or ‘cost-per-learner’ level, an LMS often makes sense. Newer approaches to the
LMS, like the open source Totara or VLE Moodle, have changed the landscape,
offering a lower-cost and more agile approach to the management and delivery of
learning.

9. Security

There’s a good reason for having an IT department. They
worry so that you don’t have to worry. There’s a whole load of scary problems
around bandwidth, loading, legals and security that most people don’t fully
understand. In this age of DoS attacks, hacking and malware, we should be
grateful that these people are looking after our interests. An LMS is a
controlled environment that can save us from ourselves.

10. Manages data

All organisations need some level of management data. Let’s
not forget that in the supposedly good ol’ days, the only data you got from
classroom trainers was dumb-ass, happy sheets. Data, with analysis, gives you
insights. Insights are what managers need to make decisions and innovate. A good LMS spits out data and that is useful.

Conclusion

The LMS market has moved on with new players, open source
options, xAPI and more data sensitive delivery. The danger lies with those
vendors who just see more and more control as desirable, as opposed to a degree
of looseness, if not chaos. The arguments between the LMS is dead and the LMS
fanboys is often one between realists and idealists. In practice, we need a bit
of both. The truth is that this is a multi-billion pound market that grows
every year. It is NOT disappearing. There will always be a need for single
solutions. I just hope that this does not descend into the mess that is the all-embracing, death-clutch that is ‘Talent
management’.

2 Comments:

Dear Mr. Clark: I have just seen and greatly enjoyed your conference on educational theory, and found it very instructive, and a nice wisp of fresh air -here in Spain we are subjected to a dogmatic and unquestionable diet of Constructivism day in, day out, from the legislation downwards-. Did you publish the book you mentioned during the presentation?

I agree with all the cons but can think of technologies more suited to the task than an LMS for every pro listed. #4 for example would be better facilitated by an all-in-one content platform like Inkling, and #5 better facilitated by a content aggregation platform like PathGather. I don't think an LMS really passes muster for #3 either. A system that brings order to chaos would provide context to all organizational resources - internal and 3rd party - while being agnostic to the source of the content. LMS are primarily designed to house formal learning resources and are not good for bringing order to the 80% of learning that happens informally. They don't so much bring order to chaos as ignore the chaos (aka bulk share of where learning actually happens) and offer the appearance of order.